Still Searching

I believe that everyone should have the right to her choices. But I can’t lie to you: this woman’s First Person column, about abandoning her career the minute she discovered she was pregnant, left me mightily depressed.

I’m all in favor of discernment, and if Hannah Goodwin now knows better what she wants in life, then bully for her. As she writes early in her piece:

Although I have the training and personality to be the type of person who puts her career above all else, I've discovered that, to my surprised relief, there are other things I value more.

But I felt a little dismayed reading the ways that she came to this discovery. Looking for the job was too inconvenient and time-consuming. The need to do phone interviews wasn’t feasible from an office she shared with six people. (Was there never another time in which or place from which to do such interviews?) But then comes the kicker: the main reasons that Goodwin was putting her own job search on hold were because she didn’t want to interfere with her husband’s job search.

As Goodwin writes:

In essence, I took the role of "trailing" spouse, preferring that my husband nail down his job first. The feminist in me was unhappy with that state of affairs, but not unhappy enough to make me get off my duff and go find a job. After thinking long and hard, I realized that although it is absolutely important to me to have a challenging job that I enjoy, my partner values the overall importance of his job much more than I do mine. Subconsciously I think I knew that. So I didn't feel justified in going out there and banging my drum, demanding that we move to a certain location so I could have my dream job and insisting that my husband follow.

It was at this point in the article that I felt the earth grinding slowly backwards on its axis. And thus commenced my silent screaming:

You “didn’t feel justified” going after your dream job and “insisting that [your] husband follow”? Honey, isn’t he insisting the same of you? Girlfriend, I just want to shake you and make you do a close reading of your own language. Do I detect fear? insecurity? ambivalence? Maybe even a little laziness?

One reason I’m so frustrated with Hannah Goodwin is that her situation is something like my own. I was a “trailing spouse” who let her husband “nail down his job first.” (God, I hate that phrase.) Like Goodwin, I reasoned that my partner “value[d] the overall importance of his job much more than I do mine.” But I’m here to tell you that that kind of other-directed-ness can come back to bite you in the ass. While my partner and I are glad for the extra time we’ve had together, we would also be the first to tell you that that time together wasn’t as happy as it could have been had we given equal — or even nearly equal —attention to my own undeniable need for meaningful work. I’m here to tell Hannah Goodwin that it’s not so simple to turn one’s back on one’s years of training and toil. For me at least, there was misery and mourning over my lost identity. It was a long, painful road to reconstructing and revising that identity and feeling again that I deserved the kind of fulfilling job that I had once declined to seek.

That struggle wasn’t just about a derailed job search. It was also about confronting my own fear, insecurity, ambivalence, and yes, laziness. It seemed a lot easier to be relieved of the things that scared me. If I never was put to the test on the market, then I never risked failure on it. Unfortunately, I felt like much more of a failure for having so blithely abandoned my own desires.

Goodwin refers to “the feminist in me” as being unhappy with her instinct to follow her husband. Again, everybody deserves to make her own choice and should not have to justify them to anyone living in a different skin. But I wonder why the feminist in her had no problem with the classic crunch for so many of us:

One of the reasons that I didn't want a tenure-track job in academe was because of the long hours involved at a time in my life when I was starting to think about having children. I feared the same would be true of work at a small start-up.

Yes. I can relate. But did you really have to turn down the possibility of a short-term consulting contract? Were there no creative solutions to be found, such as having your husband ask for a deferral on the start date of his new employment, so you could experience the consulting job’s tropical location together? And, if you didn’t like the idea of going to work pregnant, shouldn't we try to change the conditions that suggest a pregnant body is somehow embarrassing or unprofessional?

Goodwin concludes: I'm content at the thought of having some time off from work to prepare for our first child, and being able to spend as much time as I want with the baby without having to worry about when my maternity leave would end. And just like that, I learned what my priorities are: my husband and our child. My job search certainly didn't turn out the way I thought it would, but that's all right. It's good to make plans, but sometimes plans change.

I suspect that Goodwin will be very happy. I hope that she will be. Babies are, in the traditional sense of the word, awesome. Motherhood is a seriously meaningful job, one that doesn't always get the respect it deserves. And, indeed, it is great that Goodwin doesn’t have to worry about when her maternity leave will end. (At least assuming that her husband’s job stays solid and that both he and their relationship remain in good health.)

Sadly, though Goodwin also confirms one of my deepest fears about getting pregnant myself: that I will become a self-denying pod person who cheerfully sublimates my dreams. And who willfully forgets who I was or who I still want to be.

Let this be a lesson to me.